Tornado damage shows need for storm shelters
Mobile home parks at high risk
SAVANNAH, Ga. — Ten of at least 20 people killed in a weekend tornado outbreak lived in Georgia mobile home parks, yet laws requiring storm shelters in those vulnerable communities are few and far between.
Experts have long warned that mobile home dwellers face a higher risk of death when tornadoes strike, but said many trailer park owners don’t want to make the costly investment in storm shelters and the sentiment for safety wanes in the weeks after a disaster.
According to the National Weather Service, 44 percent of the 1,091 Americans killed by tornadoes from 1985 to 2005 died in mobile homes, compared to 25 percent in stick-built homes. That’s especially significant considering how few Americans — 8 percent or fewer — lived in mobile homes during that period.
Over the weekend, an unusual midwinter outbreak of dozens of tornadoes shredded two mobile home parks without shelters in southwest Georgia. Three people were killed at Big Pine Estates in Albany and seven died at Sunrise Acres in rural Cook County.
For most of the U.S., installing storm shelters remains a voluntary decision, whether for a private home, a mobile home park or a community center. Alabama and Illinois have laws mandating that new public schools are built with storm shelters, and Minnesota requires shelters at mobile home parks with spaces for 10 or more homes built since 1988. The city of Wichita, Kan., has a similar ordinance for parks built since 1994.
“... The mobile home industry and mobile home park owners have put up a lot of resistance to it,” citing high costs, said Laura Myers, who studies tornado disasters and responses as executive director of the Center for Advanced Public Safety at the University of Alabama.
A tornado nearly six years ago demolished homes and churches just up the road from the Mountain View Estates mobile home park in northwest Georgia. The close call frightened owner David Roden into taking action.
“We knew that, if we had taken a direct hit at our manufactured home park, not all our residents would be alive,” Roden said. “When the weatherman comes on TV, he says ‘if you live in a mobile home, get out now!’ Well, we didn’t have anywhere to go.”
Roden said he spent a six-figure sum — he won’t say exactly how much — on a shelter made of solid steel, and equipped with a restroom and a generator. He figures it could hold up to 200 people at his park in Rossville.